Radio hams at the Caister Lifeboat visitor centre managed to contact more than 130 other radio amateurs in 29 different countries when they took part in the annual International Marconi Day to mark the inventor's birthday.

Radio hams at the Caister Lifeboat visitor centre managed to contact more than 130 other radio amateurs in 29 different countries when they took part in the annual International Marconi Day to mark the inventor's birthday.

Notable contacts included Queensland, Australia (using Morse code) and another in Saint Thomas on the US Virgin Islands (using speech). Other contacts varied from a ham north of the Arctic Circle in Lapland to another aboard a yacht in the Mediterranean.

The station's signals crossed the Atlantic on three other occasions, making contact with hams in Newfoundland, Massachusetts and North Carolina.

Contacts closer to home established by the station on the coast near Great Yarmouth included a holidaying ham in Caister and numerous other radio amateurs around the UK.

The Norfolk Amateur Radio Club (NARC) ran the all-day special event station with the callsign GB0CMS at Caister Lifeboat visitor centre to commemorate the village's original Marconi wireless station, which was established at Caister in 1900. The station was in a house in the High Street known as Pretoria Villa and its original purpose was to communicate with ships in the North Sea and the Cross Sand lightship.

On Saturday, the closest to Guglielmo Marconi's birthday, stations around the world were set up at sites with historical links to the inventor's work. These include Poldhu in England; Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Glace Bay, Nova Scotia; Villa Griffone, Bologna, Italy and many others.